SONIC Speaker Series Presents: Robert Ackland

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Robert Ackland who will present his talk on Tuesday, April 10th, 2016 at 9:00 AM in Frances Searle Building, Room 3-417. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Ackland please schedule a time HERE.  Join our Facebook Event HERE.

Please contact Eric Forbush with any questions or comments.

Frames and Fields on Twitter

Associate Professor School of Sociology Centre for Social Research & Methods ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
Associate Professor School of Sociology Centre for Social Research & Methods
ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences

Abstract

We characterize an online activist field as a social arena in which participants vie for the definition of the most urgent cause or risk issue. We ask the question: to what extent is it conceptually and empirical valid to regard protest activity on Twitter, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, as an online activist field? Network analysis is used to examine two core aspects of field theory: the behavior of incumbents vs new entrants in response to a new issue or frame, and the dynamics of field formation. This project extends earlier research concerning organizations involved in environmental social movements and online collective identity formation and contributes to emerging research on activism in the era of the “networked individual”.

Biography 

Robert Ackland is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Sociology and the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University. He has degrees in economics from the University of Melbourne, Yale University and the ANU, where he gained his PhD on index number theory in the context of cross-country comparisons of income and inequality in 2001, and he has worked as an economist at the Australian Department of Immigration and the World Bank. Since 2002 Robert has been conducting quantitative research into online social and organizational networks, and his research has appeared in journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Social Networks, Computational Economics, Social Science Computer Review, and the Journal of Social Structure. He leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks Lab and he created the VOSON software for hyperlink network construction and analysis, which has been publicly available since 2006 and is used by researchers worldwide. Robert established the Social Science of the Internet specialization in the ANU’s Master of Social Research in 2008, and his book Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age (SAGE) was published in 2013. Robert has been chief investigator on five Australian Research Council grants and in 2007, he was a UK National Centre for e-Social Science Visiting Fellow and James Martin Visiting Fellow based at the Oxford Internet Institute. In 2011, he was appointed to the Science Council of the Web Foundation’s Web Index project and he recently contributed a background paper to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends.

More information can be found at Robert’s website: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/ackland-rj

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SONIC Speaker Series Presents: Corinne Coen

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Corinne Coen who will present a talk on Tuesday, March 29th, 2016 at 9:00 AM in Frances Searle Building, Room 1-483. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Coen please schedule a time HERE. Please contact Meghan McCarter with any questions or comments.

Associate Professor, Organizational Behavior, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western University
Associate Professor, Organizational Behavior, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western University

The New Foundations: Emergence, Constructionism and the New Reductionism

Abstract

The science of studying emergence is not well understood among organizational scholars.  Scholars often transfer assumptions from variance analysis to this particular application of process analysis.  Further, its components parts—emerging, emergent outcomes and their properties—are often confounded leading to muddled thinking.  In this paper, I distinguish among these components.  Specifically, I discuss the features of complex systems drawing out distinctions between complex vs complicated non-linear systems, constituting vs causing, aggregation, levels, and holism.  I draw out the implications of this research approach, emphasizing the paradigm shift required to apply it from other approaches, using examples from organization studies, particularly the Strategy Microfoundations debate.

Biography 

Corinne Coen is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Weatherhead School of Management in Case Western Reserve University where she holds the Lewis Progressive Fellowship and is the Chair of the Faculty Council. She has an MBA from University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Michigan. Her research interests focus on the dynamics of work teams as they generate cooperation and competition, cohesion, and sub-groups.  In the pursuit of understanding these dynamic processes, Corinne has special expertise in agent-based modeling and the study of cross-level emergence.  Her work has been published in Organizational Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory and Simulation Modeling Practice and Theory.

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SONIC Speaker Series Presents: Charles Macal

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Charles Macal who will present a talk on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2016 at 10:00 AM in Frances Searle Building, Room 1-483. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Macal please schedule a time HERE. Please contact Meghan McCarter with any questions or comments.

Senior Systems Engineer, Agonne Distinguished Fellow, Social & Behavioral Systems, Group Argonne National Lab

Simulating Chicago (and Everyone in It)

Abstract

chiSIM, the Chicago Social Interaction Model, is an agent-based model of people and places in Chicago along with the daily activities in which residents engage. To support planning and policy making, chiSIM models the behaviors and social interactions of all Chicago residents, represented in the model at the individual level. Places consist of geo-located parcels in the city, such as households, schools, workplaces, hospitals, and general quarters, such as nursing homes, dormitories, jails, etc. During the course of a simulated day, agents move from place to place, hour by hour, engaging in social activities and interactions with co-located agents. Examples of applications for this model include forecasting socially mediated processes, such as the spread of infectious diseases and the adoption of new technologies; measuring the potential effectiveness of public health and social programs and interventions; and assessing population-wide energy usage.

Biography 

Charles Macal, PhD, PE, is Senior Systems Engineer, Argonne Distinguished Fellow, and Group Leader of the Social & Behavioral Systems Group within the Global Security Sciences Division of Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Macal is recognized globally as a leader in the field of agent-based modeling and simulation and has led interdisciplinary research teams in developing innovative computer simulation models in application areas including global and regional energy markets, critical materials, electric power, healthcare and infectious diseases, environment and sustainability, and technology adoption. Dr. Macal holds Senior Fellow appointments at the Computation Institute (CI) of the University of Chicago and the Northwestern-Argonne Institute for Science and Engineering (NAISE). He received a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences from Northwestern University and holds an M.S. in Industrial Engineering and a B.S. in Engineering Sciences from Purdue University.

Stream the full presentation here:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/OPkDJ7Z1Gcw

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SONIC Speaker Series Presents A Practice Job Talk: Brian Keegan on Nov. 13th, 2015

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome back Brian Keegan (a Ph.D. Graduate from NU’s Media, Technology & Society program), who will present a talk on Friday, November 13th, 2015 at 1:30 PM in the SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building 1-459. All are welcome to attend.

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Collaboration in Bursty Information Systems: Wikipedia’s Coverage of Breaking News Events

Abstract

Bursts are characterized by a sudden onset, significant change in intensity, and temporary duration of collective social behavior. As “software eats the world” and makes critical economic and social infrastructures more interconnected, managing ever more interoperable information systems in the face of bursts will take on heightened importance. Wikipedia’s coverage of current events is a compelling context to understand how open collaborations coordinate complex, time-sensitive, and knowledge-intensive work in the absence of central authority, stable membership, clear roles, or reliable information. Using 1.1 million revisions made to 3,233 Wikipedia articles about current events between 2001 and 2011, I employ social network analysis methods to test whether the structures of high-tempo collaborations on Wikipedia articles are (a) similarly structured over time, (b) exhibit features of organizational regeneration, and (c) have similar collaboration dynamics over time. The mediation of bursty behaviors through information systems capturing detailed records enables researchers to develop richer models of the antecedents, processes, and consequences of social disruptions. This research has implications for developing organizational strategies to manage bursty behavior and suggests new directions to theorize online knowledge collaborations.

Biography

Brian Keegan is a research associate and data scientist for the Harvard Business School’s HBX online learning platform. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University’s School of Communication in 2012 and was a post-doctoral research fellow in network and computational social science at Northeastern University until 2014. His research analyzes the structure and dynamics of online knowledge collaborations such as Wikipedia, Twitter, and online education under high-tempo and bursty conditions.

Please contact Meghan McCarter with any questions or comments.

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Ludo Waltman’s Talk is Now Live on Youtube

DSC_0035On September 9th, 2015, Ludo Waltman visited Northwestern University’s SONIC Lab to give a talk on Large-scale analysis of bilbliometric networks: Tools, techniques, and applications. Ludo’s full abstract, as well as the presentation, can be seen below.

Large-scale analysis of bibliometric networks: Tools, techniques, and applications

Abstract

The analysis of bibliometric networks has the potential to offer deep insights into the structure and dynamics of science. I will provide an overview of research into bibliometric network analysis at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University. Two popular software tools for the analysis and visualization of bibliometric networks have been created at CWTS. These tools, VOSviewer (www.vosviewer.com) and CitNetExplorer (www.citnetexplorer.nl), will be demonstrated and the underlying network analysis techniques will be discussed. A number of large-scale applications of bibliometric network analysis will be presented. One application investigates the degree to which network science is evolving to become a single unified research field. Other applications are concerned with research planning and research evaluation. In these applications, bibliometric network analysis is used to identify the key research strengths of a university, to study the interdisciplinary nature of modern science, and to detect new emerging research areas.

 

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The SONIC Speaker Series: Ryan Boyd on Nov. 18th, 2015

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Ryan Boyd, who will present a talk on Wednesday, November 18th, 2015 at 10:00 AM in the SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building 1-459. All are welcome to attend.

To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Ryan Boyd please schedule a time here.

Title 

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A Way with Words: Language and Psychological Science in the Modern Era

Abstract

In the modern era, people generate data on a scale never before witnessed in human history. In particular, the internet creates a space where people can express their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in their own words. The language that people share inherently reflects the precise phenomena that many social scientists seek to capture and understand. However, language data can often be difficult to quantify and understand in objective, empirical terms. How can we use a person’s language to better understand their social and psychological processes? This talk provides an overview of research that illustrates just how powerful words can be for understanding a person’s mental universe. Research discussed will include topics such as psychological fingerprinting, values, mental health, and often-overlooked social processes.

Biography

Ryan Boyd is a senior graduate student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Ryan is considered to be a leading expert on natural language, big data, and social psychology. Additionally, he is the developer of various language analysis applications that have been adopted for research in over 30 countries around the world. His work has been published in top psychology journals, including Psychological Science, and has been repeatedly featured at interdisciplinary research conferences.

Please contact Meghan McCarter with any questions or comments.

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The SONIC Speaker Series: Christopher Marcum on Nov. 4th, 2015

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Christopher Marcum, who will present a talk on Wednesday, November 4th, 2015 at 4:00 PM in the SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building 1-459. All are welcome to attend.

To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Marcum please schedule a time here.

Title

NHGRImarcum

An Ego-Centric Relational Events Model of Buffet Selection Processes in an Experimental Virtual Reality Setting

Abstract

The relational events model (REM) framework for social action (Butts 2008) has recently been demonstrated to be useful as a model of a wide range of temporally unfolding events and not just limited to the dyadic case as originally designed. The framework has shown promise, for example, in modeling ego-centric studies, as well as event histories that involve multiple event types and exogenous events (Marcum & Butts 2015). Additionally, recent work has demonstrated how careful use of support constraints within the REM framework facilitates its application in experimental designs (Tranmer et al. 2015). We extend this line of research by combining these various generalized applications of the REM in a single scenario—ego-centric event histories with multiple event types and support constraints in an experimental design.

Two hundred twenty-one overweight mothers of children between 4 and 5 were randomized to one of four feedback conditions that emphasized different health information about eating and health: 1) food safety control (Control); 2) behavioral-risk information; or 3), behavioral-risk information plus personal family health history-based risk assessment. After a short survey was administered to the participants and they were given their randomly selected feedback to read, each mother put on a head-mounted display helmet and was immersed in a virtual buffet environment. In the buffet, mothers selected from a set of virtual food and drink choices for their child’s lunch. Prior work (McBride et al. 2013) has shown that the feedback conditions deferentially impacted the total number of calories on the plate at the end of the simulation. Here, however, we evaluate whether the behavioral food selection process giving rise to those choices also differs by feedback condition.

We use the REM framework to address a simple research question: 1) to what extent do the feedback conditions shape the behavioral process unfolding during the buffet simulation? We specify sufficient statistics for both environmental and behavioral constraints on the buffet selection process. These include structural statistics for the food ordering effects and differential serving sizes, and behavioral statistics for choice inertia, “saving dessert for last” and “grazing versus browsing.” Preliminary REM results show evidence of differential preferences for the rate at which certain foodstuffs are selected, that smaller portion size drives actors to make multiple selections of the same foodstuff in a row, healthful choices are likely to precede unhealthful ones, and spatial ordering effects. Differential impacts of the feedback condition on the behavioral selection process will be discussed in the context of REM model selection.

Biography

Dr. Marcum received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California-Irvine in 2011. His dissertation research focused on health and social structural explanations of age differences in daily social interactions. His current research seeks to understand how health shapes family network processes across the life course, on the one hand, and to develop statistical models for network analysis on the other. Through his methodological work in mathematical sociology he has demonstrated expertise in modeling a wide range of social systems, including: interorganizational disaster response networks, relational events processes, epidemic dynamics, and inter-generational communication.

 

A recording of Christopher Marcum’s Presentation can be found here, or can be viewed below!

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The SONIC Speaker Series: Polo Chau on Oct. 7th 2015

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Polo Chau, who will present a talk on Wednesday, October 7th, 2015 at 3:00 PM in the SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building 1-459. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Chau please schedule a time here. Please contact Meghan McCarter with any questions or comments.

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Data Mining Meets HCI: Scalable Interactive Tools for Large Graph Sensemaking

Abstract

My group at Georgia Tech innovates at the intersection of Data Mining and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to help people make sense of massive datasets. We combine the best from both worlds to create novel tools for billions-scale graphs. I will describe some of our latest works and ideas:

1) Attention Routing, based on anomaly detection, that draws people’s attention to interesting parts of the graph. Examples include the Polonium and Aesop malware detection technology, deployed and patented by Symantec, that unearth malware from 37 billion machine-file relationships, with up to 99% detection rate; the NetProbe system detects auction fraud on eBay and fingers bad guys by identifying their networks of suspicious transactions.

2) Mixed-initiative graph sensemaking, such as the Apolo system and the MAGE system that combines machine inference and visualization to guide the user to interactively explore large graphs.

3) Scalable analytics that leverages virtual memory to enable billion-node computation on a single PC, using simple code that outperforms state-of-the-art techniques.

Biography 

Duen Horng (Polo) Chau is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering, and an Associate Director of the MS Analytics program. Polo holds a PhD in Machine Learning and a Masters in human-computer interaction (HCI). His PhD thesis won Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention.

Polo’s research lab bridges data mining and HCI to solves large-scale, real world problems. They develop scalable, interactive, and interpretable tools for big data analytics.  Their patented Polonium malware detection technology protects 120 million people worldwide. Their auction fraud detection research was widely covered by media. Their fake review detection research received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2014 SIAM Data Mining Conference.

Polo received faculty awards from Google, Yahoo, and LexisNexis, Raytheon Faculty Fellowship, Edenfield Faculty Fellowship, Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. He is the only two-time Symantec fellow and an award-winning designer.

 

A recording of Polo Chau’s Presentation can be found here, or can be viewed below!

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The SONIC Speaker Series: Arno Scharl on Sept. 23rd, 2015

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Arno Scharl, who will present a talk on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015 at 10:00 AM in the SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building 1-459. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Scharl please schedule a time here. Please contact Meghan McCarter with any questions or comments.

 

Prof. DDr. Arno SCHARL, Department Head MODUL University Vienna (www.modul.ac.at), innen, sitzend, Interview
Prof. DDr. Arno SCHARL, Department Head MODUL University Vienna (www.modul.ac.at)

Web Intelligence and Visual Analytics to Reveal the Impact of Online Communication

Abstract

The visual analytics tools of the webLyzard Web intelligence platform show the lexical, geospatial and relational context of topics and entities referenced news and social media coverage. This talk illustrates the platform’s capabilities with examples from the Media Watch on Climate Change, the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit and the NOAA Media Watch. These applications aggregate environmental Web content from a wide range of online sources, visualize patterns identified in the gathered content, and have led to the development of the webLyzard Stakeholder Dialog and Opinion Model (WYSDOM). Going beyond bipolar assessments of sentiment, WYSDOM provides real-time insights into the success of marketing and public outreach activities. It enables scientists and communication professionals to better understand how different stakeholders perceive observable risks and policy options, how specific media channels react to new insights, and how journalists present scientific knowledge to the public.

Three ongoing research projects advance the presented methods for knowledge extraction [2] and visualization [3]: ASAP increases the scalability of these methods; PHEME enriches their functionality by adding veracity detection to reveal online myths and rumors; DecarboNet extends and applies them to build a knowledge co-creation platform [1] that combines content analysis and social network analysis to identify information diffusion patterns within and across online communities.

Biography

Prof. Arno Scharl heads the Department of New Media Technology at MODUL University Vienna, and is the managing director of webLyzard technology. Prior to his current appointments, he held professorships at the University of Western Australia and Graz University of Technology, and was a Visiting Fellow at Curtin University of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. Arno completed his doctoral research and habilitation at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Additionally, he holds a PhD from the University of Vienna, Department of Sports Physiology. Having authored more than 160 refereed publications and edited two books in Springer‘s Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series, his research interests focus on Web intelligence and big data analytics, human-computer interaction, and the integration of semantic and geospatial Web technology.

References

  1. Scharl, A., Hubmann-Haidvogel, A., Sabou, M., Weichselbraun, A. and Lang, H.-P. (2013). “From Web Intelligence to Knowledge Co-Creation – A Platform to Analyze and Support Stakeholder Communication”, IEEE Internet Computing, 17(5): 21-29.
  2. Scharl, A., Herring, D., Rafelsberger, W., Hubmann-Haidvogel, A., Kamolov, R., Fischl, D., Föls, M. and Weichselbraun, A. (2015). “Semantic Systems and Visual Tools to Support Environmental Communication”, IEEE Systems Journal: Forthcoming (Accepted 31 July 2015).
  3. Weichselbraun, A., Gindl, S. and Scharl, A. (2014). “Enriching Semantic Knowledge Bases for Opinion Mining in Big Data Applications”, Knowledge-Based Systems, 69: 78-86.
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The SONIC Speaker Series: Ludo Waltman on Sept. 9th, 2015

DSC_0035SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Ludo Waltman, who will present a talk on Wednesday, September 9th, 2015 at 10:00 AM in the SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building 1-459. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Waltman please schedule a time here. To sign up for his workshop, click here. Please contact Eric Forbush with any questions or comments.

Large-scale analysis of bibliometric networks: Tools, techniques, and applications

Abstract

The analysis of bibliometric networks has the potential to offer deep insights into the structure and dynamics of science. I will provide an overview of research into bibliometric network analysis at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University. Two popular software tools for the analysis and visualization of bibliometric networks have been created at CWTS. These tools, VOSviewer (www.vosviewer.com) and CitNetExplorer (www.citnetexplorer.nl), will be demonstrated and the underlying network analysis techniques will be discussed. A number of large-scale applications of bibliometric network analysis will be presented. One application investigates the degree to which network science is evolving to become a single unified research field. Other applications are concerned with research planning and research evaluation. In these applications, bibliometric network analysis is used to identify the key research strengths of a university, to study the interdisciplinary nature of modern science, and to detect new emerging research areas.

 

Biography

Ludo Waltman is a senior researcher at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University, where he leads the research program on advanced bibliometric methods. Ludo’s research interests focus on methodological topics in the field of bibliometrics and scientometrics, in particular the analysis and visualization of bibliometric networks and the development of bibliometric indicators. Together with his colleague Nees Jan van Eck, Ludo has developed two software tools for the analysis and visualization of bibliometric networks: VOSviewer and CitNetExplorer. Ludo serves as Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Informetrics, one of the leading journals in the field of bibliometrics and scientometrics. Ludo also has an extensive experience in the use of bibliometric network analysis in commissioned research projects for universities, research funders, and scientific publishers.

 

 

Workshop ‘Network visualization using VOSviewer’

Date & Time: September 9th, 2 pm

Location: SONIC Lab, room 1-459, Francis Searle, Northwestern University

VOSviewer (www.vosviewer.com) is a popular software tool for network visualization developed at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University. The main focus of the tool is on visualizing bibliometric networks, in particular co-authorship networks, citation networks, and term co-occurrence networks, but VOSviewer can also be used for visualizing all kinds of non-bibliometric networks. This workshop offers an introduction into the VOSviewer tool. Ludo Waltman, one of the developers of VOSviewer, will guide the workshop participants through an interactive tutorial that provides the participants with extensive hands-on experience with VOSviewer. At the end of the workshop, participants will be able to create their own network visualizations using VOSviewer. This includes not only visualizations of bibliometric networks constructed based on data from databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed, but also visualizations of other types of networks, including term co-occurrence networks constructed from a large text corpora using VOSviewer’s text mining features.

Workshop participants are kindly requested to bring a laptop with them.

 

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 Flyers

Click on this link to see the flyer for Ludo Waltman’s presentation: Waltman Speaker Flyer

Click on this link to see the flyer for Ludo Waltman’s workshop: Waltman Workshop Flyer

 

 

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